Ancient Atari 2600 Arcade Port emerges for the World to finally see after 31 years

Xevious

Here's a quick looping sample of the newly discovered Xevious Atari 2600 game that was never released to the market.

xevious-2600-1(small).gif (133.24 KiB) Viewed 2027 times

The discovered cartridge was created on Jan 18, 1984. Holy cow that a long time ago.The Digital Game Museum (in Santa Clara) came across a near-complete version of the cancelled Atari 2600 version of arcade classic Xevious. Behold the primitive glory of what passed for a console port in the early ‘80s.

For those of you that haven’t been alive and gaming for as long as I have, Xevious was a scrolling arcade shooter released in 1982 by Namco. With sharp graphics and relatively frenetic action, it was one of my go-to games whenever I’d steal quarters from my grandmother’s purse and hit up the local arcade.

As it did with many popular arcade titles, Atari had planned ports of Xevious for both the Atari 2600 and 5200. Both were cancelled in 1984. In progress versions of the 2600 version have been floating around since, but have lacked a title screen, final sprites, enemy waves, and music.

Then this showed up at the Digital Game Museum as part of a donation of Atari memorabilia.

“This version of Xevious is one of the most faithful arcade ports I’ve ever played on the Atari 2600,” said Dave Beaudoin, Digital Game Museum board member via official press release. ”The speed and responsiveness combined with the graphics and audio are jaw dropping. It’s amazing they were able to get this kind of performance out of the 2600.”

Sure it’s silly now, but back in the day I would have killed for a chance to play this. The "museum" worked the video game & pinball convention California Extreme so guests of the show get a chance to see, hear & play the game. Guests will be able to play the newly-discovered classic on an Atari 2600 system, with a full arcade version standing by for comparison’s sake.